[mythtv-users] Hardware and software battles

Jeffrey Preston jpreston at longlines.com
Thu Jan 19 02:18:18 UTC 2012


I have been an enthusiastic supporter of MythTV for years. I started with
version Mythbuntu 8.10 back in 2008. I had three PVR-150's on an Intel WASP
875 based system, with a 3.2GHz P4, with 2 Gigs of memory that I bought for
about 250 bucks. Not too bad for a media server on the cheap. Time rolls on,
and the system does well for almost 3 years. The along comes the Missouri
river floods of 2011.  Since my home was located less than a mile from the
river, and flood waters ended up only a few hundred yards from my front
steps, we had to remove a lot of stuff from our house, which included the
server running Mythbuntu. 

Fast forward several months later...

I decided to re-install the server, add some digital tuners, and start over
with clean installs of Mythbuntu 11.10 running the latest edition of MythTV,
version 0.24.1. 

Problem 1 - Version 11.10 will not boot on the Intel WASP 875 board I have
(Locks up on "Kernel Thread Helper". Went back to version 11.04. Problem
solved for the moment. 

Problem 2 - Since the Intel WASP board has five PCI slots, I filled them up
with three PVR-150's, one pcHDTV HD-5500, and one ATi HDTV Wonder card. One
or more of the PVR-150's would not work or worked unreliably. Turned out to
be a bad PVR-150. Casualty of the move due to the flooding, I guess.
Replaced card...problem solved. 

Problem 3 - I successfully installed version 11.04, and began setting up the
tuners, and to my surprise, scanning for channels with the analog tuners no
longer worked. But scanning for digital channels worked fine. OK, so I had
to set up the analog channels in the channel editor manually.  PITA, but
problem solved.

Problem 4 - When I watched live TV with one of the PVR-150's, the default
channel would appear. I could even change channels up and down on that tuner
without trouble.  However, when I switched inputs to one of the other
PVR-150's, I would get distorted video, stutters, and sometimes a blank
screen, followed by an error moments later about video frame buffering
failed too many times or something about a jump program file buffer. Went
back in time to version 10.10, same issues. Went back to 9.10, same thing.
Only when I loaded version 8.10, did this issue go away. Problem solved. 

Problem 5 - I then loaded up one of the Zotac MAG ION based systems I have
been planning on using as a frontend for about a year. Once I loaded up
version 8.10 on it, I learned two things. 1.The ION chipset is not
recognized at all, by anything, and 2.VDPAU, which I planned on utilizing,
was not incorporated into MythTV until version 0.22. Problem - not resolved.


So now I am stuck with a frontend I cannot use because the software I loaded
is so old it will not properly recognize the video chip. Even if I somehow
managed to load the latest drivers, MythTV version 0.21 does not support
VDPAU, so it really doesn't matter. 

 

Has anyone else seen this issue with the analog tuners?  Is this the same
bug as here: http://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/9177

 

Or am I seeing something different?

 

Has anyone experienced this issue and resolved the problem with some
work-a-round?  The one listed in the ticket doesn't seem to work for me, as
I cannot figure out how to make the default tuner be the digital one when
first going into live TV.

 

Is anyone using the PVR-150 with MythTV 0.24.1 successfully? 

 

Is anyone using an analog tuner with MythTV 0.24.1 successfully?

 

Thanks,

 

Jeff

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